Twitter Is a Hateful Place by Design

This week, after years spent politely enabling Alex Jones to tell vicious lies about Sandy Hook families, September 11 victims, and what happens in the basement of a pizza restaurant in suburban Washington, D.C., the world’s largest tech companies began scrubbing him from their platforms. Citing to their community standards or terms of service, Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Stitcher banned the network of channels and pages and podcasts with which he earned millions of followers. His email marketing client severed their relationship. Pinterest took away his pinbox. Even LinkedIn, a site that will normally do anything to get users to engage with it, asked Jones to find a different medium through which to tend to his professional network.

The service, which aspires to deliver breaking news and fun dog photos but in fact serves as a virtual playground for Nazis, will not be banning InfoWars, explained CEO Jack Dorsey in a plaintive follow-up thread, because it has no legitimate reason for doing so. If the company were to stop enforcing its principles “impartially” and “regardless of political viewpoints,” he wrote, it would “become a service that’s constructed by our personal views.” To Dorsey, things like “school shootings are staged” and “the government controls the weather” count as “political viewpoints” that he must protect from the dangers of creeping censorship.

Twitter affords a longer leash than its competitors to hate speech, misinformation, and conspiracy theories because those things have been intrinsic to the company’s success, practically since the day it launched. In a 2017 profile, co-founder Evan Williams reflected on the lessons he’d learned over his career in Silicon Valley. “I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” he said. Based on recent events, he admitted, that optimism appears to have been misplaced. The platform that helped launch the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter and the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama is also largely responsible for the ascendance of the elderly racist who took his place.

The way the company operates today rests on the same assumption, though: that whether or not you think it should police its virtual public square, there is no need for it to do so, because shame will prevent those tempted to use Twitter for evil from following through on that impulse. (Just as it prevents most of them from shouting ethnic slurs, say, at the office, or in the produce aisle.) No one will listen to those responsible for breaches of decorum, because their opinions are inherently bad, and humanity is inherently good. Eventually, the carnival barkers and casual bigots alike will vanish, starved of oxygen by this hyperefficent marketplace of ideas.

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Twitter’s confidence in this framework is why it still so reticent to ban anyone, even someone like Jones, from using the service. The company envisions itself as a content-neutral provider of a safe place for speech—speech that it assumes will be, in the aggregate, good. When viewed through this lens, the flare-ups of racism and sexism and homophobia and fearmongering lies are unfortunate but insignificant side effects of living in a society in which the proverbial discourse, thanks to Twitter, grows freer and more civil by the hour.

The most famous beneficiaries of this system's permissiveness are people like Jones and Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopolous, whose names you know because they used Twitter in a very intentional way to launch full-blown careers as racist provocateurs. But for most of its early adopters, Twitter was just a fun place where regular people could riff and vent and muse, shouting into the void about their jobs or their parents or their sexual conquests or their team’s terrible quarterback or loathing of gay people or their race’s inherent superiority, without fear of meaningful consequences. Collecting the unfiltered thoughts of the Internet’s collective id was the site’s highest and best use.

This dynamic is responsible for the recent spate of public figures who have faced hard questions about what they typed into a box as teenagers and then promptly forgot about. While Sean Newcomb was pitching a near no-hitter for the Atlanta Braves last month, users discovered that he frequently employed a certain homophobic slur as college freshman. As an 18-year-old prospect, Nationals shortstop Trea Turner did the same. At 17, Brewers reliever Josh Hader tweeted, without any more context, “KKK.” UFC fighter Cody Garbrandt dropped a ton of n-bombs between 2012 and 2013. Excavating #problematic posts has evolved from Gamergate niche hobby to a standard part of vetting anyone standing at the doorstep of fame, and there are many people to whom a diligent review of their transcript is unkind.

Twitter has become such a cesspool of awfulness that, in a strange meta development, bad-faith actors are now using this strategy to target women and people of color, pretending not to understand the difference between, for example, recently-excavated evidence of bona fide bigotry and dumb jokes that make fun of white people. Sarah Jeong, whose timeline is riddled with such shocking and offensive statements as "#CancelWhitePeople" and “it must be so boring to be white,” managed to keep her job at the Times, but just barely. The process that has proven effective at outing racists has become a weapon of the same racists who were so attracted to Twitter in the first place.

The presumption of anonymity seems ridiculous now—that Twitter is “just Twitter,” and that no one will notice a notable person’s ill-advised tweet and immediately post a screenshot, in case the offender deletes it in a fit of self-awareness. But eight years ago, many of those who are now among its more visible members had no idea they’d ever have reason to care about what others think of their darker and more vile proclivities. Once upon a time, Josh Hader was just a guy, and he used Twitter the same way everyone else did. As the generation that began tweeting in middle school starts applying for jobs and earning scholarships and signing rookie deals and seeking political office, the Advanced Search tools are going to get even more would-be famous people to tell on themselves in the years to come.

Whether a given bad tweet is the product of racism, ignorance, or a poorly-developed sense of humor will always be in the eye of the retweeter. But whatever their genesis, it isn’t an accident that so many bad old tweets exist in the first place, and why the company is in no hurry to excise those who traffic in them: Hatred was hard-wired into Twitter from its inception, because it has always encouraged the whole world to revel in being the worst versions of themselves in 140-character or 280-character bursts. The only price of this steady flow of bigotry-fueled traffic is the occasional outrage cycle that disappears in a few days, buried underneath the next clever hashtag or unhinged Trump rant. Twitter is happy to pay it every single time.